Workaround to create a category page

It can be quite a search to find the perfect WordPress theme. One that has a design you like, is nice and fast, and has all the functionalities you need. So, imagine you’ve finally found a theme you like, that answers all your needs, only to realise you’re not happy with the way it generates the category pages. Terribly frustrating, right?

You know that category pages are important for your SEO efforts, so you want them to be to your liking. But what can you do? Is creating a clever workaround a good solution? And how is your SEO affected when you do that? In this Ask Yoast, I’ll discuss what you should consider before you go for a fix like that.

Saurabh emailed us a possible workaround for creating a category page:

I can’t style my category pages the way I want because they are dynamically generated. I thought of the following workaround: creating a regular page for each category, styling it and adding a blog module to show the right items and redirecting the default category to these pages. Is that a good solution, SEO wise?

Watch the video or read the transcript for the answer!

Building your category pages

“Well, from an SEO perspective, it might work, but it might make changing themes later on, really a bit of a hassle.

So, I would not do that. I would just go with the theme that already allows you to do what you want to do on the category pages themselves. That probably means you have to go with a bit more of a builder, something like Divi, or Elementor or Beaver Builder which allows you to do a lot more on those pages. Good luck!”

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5 Responses to Workaround to create a category page

Farid • 1 year ago

thanks for this article.
i have a question about seo of category pages seo and get rank for each cat.
is it good idea to make category pages like single-posts ?
for example make a big title header and other extra meta (custom fields) and in the body a long description (like posts) and then show the list of posts (of category)

and then each category can be like posts with usefull details and description.it will be good at ranking of category ?

Filipe Morato Gomes • 1 year ago

Hello Joost,
I’m a user of Genesis Framework on my travel blog and for the destination pages (like a country page) I use a combination of custom taxonomies (to create the destination, instead of using a “normal” category) + custom fields (to insert the additional info I’d like to display) + Genesis Simple Hooks plugin + php code to display that info (text + images) before the posts. Does it make sense? (For example, this is the page for Portugal, displaying that additional country info + available posts: https://www.almadeviajante.com/viagens/portugal/ )

Mara Alexander • 1 year ago

Speaking of incredibly frustrating… this article came up in Google News (which I read on my phone). I wanted to read more, but not on my phone, so I shared it through Pushbullet to Firefox on my desktop. This is something I do all the time with virtually no issues…except for your article.

I tried twice, and each time I was sent to your index page, not the blog article page.

Ahmed • 1 year ago

Hi, can you please tell about the new Google update and the SEO around the update?

Melina Reintjens • 1 year ago

Hi Ahmed! We have a post about Google’s new update planned for this Wednesday, keep an eye on our blog!